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What Cities Can Teach Marketers About Marketing

This article is by Andy Levine, president and chief creative officer at Development Counsellors International.

If you are like most consumer marketing professionals, you probably vie with three to six direct competitors on a regular basis.

But what if you had more than 30,000 competitors? That’s the number of cities and towns in the U.S. alone that are competing every day to win new corporate investment, attract both group and leisure travelers, and draw new residents to their community. Yes, it’s a tough battle.

While it may seem counterintuitive, I decided to ask the following question: What can consumer marketers learn from the people who successfully market their communities? Put another way, what can “smart cities” and the men and women who promote them teach the private sector about marketing? As I pondered the question, six key learnings emerged:

1. Smart Cities Understand The Art of Collaboration: “Place marketers,” as I like to call them, coordinate their community branding efforts across a wide range of organizations and community leaders without the benefit of hierarchal authority. They share resources – both financial and human. And in most cases, they learn to work together. As Benjamin Franklin once cautioned: “We can all hang together, or surely we will all hang separately.”

2. Smart Cities Know How to Work with Smaller Budgets: Tourism and economic development marketing budgets are ridiculously low. If you add up the tourism marketing budgets of the five largest cities in America (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami and Philadelphia combined), it is still lower than the budget for the “Swiffer” (a cleaning product that is basically a diaper on a stick). Yes, smart cities have learned how to do more with less.

A sign near City Hall points to the sister cities of Los Angeles (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

3. Smart Cities Focus on Match Rather Than Reach: With a limited budget, they direct available resources at a very narrow group of decision makers. One of the most successful economic-development programs I’ve ever seen focused on reaching and influencing the decision makers at 200 carefully selected companies. It was a true rifle-shot approach. And it worked.

4. Smart Cities Turn to Earned Media To Do the Heavy Lifting: Smaller budgets drive place marketers to rely on the news media to communicate their message. They are willing to give up a bit of control in favor of a much higher level of credibility. An engaging segment on Anthony Bourdain’s “Going Places” or a favorable article in The Wall Street Journal has the third-party endorsement of the news outlet. That’s powerful.

5. Smart Cities Know the Importance of Influencer Marketing: Travel marketers focus on working with the association meetings planners or incentive buyers that can literally bring thousands of new visitors to their communities. Economic developers build strong relationships with site selection consultants, a niche industry of professionals that advise Corporate America on where to locate new facilities. Even in the digital age, the right middleman still yields enormous influence.

6. Smart Cities Are Starting to Use Their Own Residents as Digital Ambassadors: Tampa, Louisville, El Paso and Denver are among the innovators in this space. They recruit socially savvy community champions. And then quietly deliver interesting digital content asking them to “share” with their friends and followers on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. The cost is minimal. And it is very powerful stuff.

The marketing teams at Coca Cola, Procter & Gamble and Starbucks might chuckle at the suggestion that a city can teach them a thing or two about effective marketing. But when you’re forced to achieve more with less every day, it sharpens the mind and with it, your approach to marketing.

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